Professor Paul Engelkamp studied applied economics at the Universities of Bochum and Freiburg. From the latter, he received his Ph.D in 1978 with a thesis on "Decision behaviour under risk conditions". His habilitation took place in 1989 by completing the thesis "between competition and monopoly, a price theoretical analysis considering the number of firms and the degree of product differentiation". In the same year, he was awarded the venia legendi and became visiting lecturer at the University of Freiburg, Faculty of Applied Economics. In the following three years, he held the position of a market researcher at a building materials company and developed several company-owned studies. Afterwards, he became Managing Director of the former European Development Centre for Inland Navigation (EBD) and, simultaneously, Head of Department Transport Economy. The merger of Duisburg Towing Tank (VBD) and EBD in 1998 resulted in his appointment as General Manager and Chairman of the Board of the unified institute which was renamed in 2004 to Development Centre for Ship Technology and Transport Systems.

Microeconomics, market research and empirical market analyses and industrial economics were the main fields he followed up on during his postdoctoral lectures in Freiburg. In 1995, he was appointed as supernumerary professor by the senate of the University of Freiburg. In 2001, he received another teaching assignment at the University of Duisburg-Essen with special emphasis to transport policy and waterborne transport.

Two main fields of DST activities are research and investigation in shallow water hydrodynamics and studies dealing with technical feasibility, economic viability, market acceptance and environmental impacts of waterborne transport.
The aim of hydrodynamic research of DST is to investigate flow conditions around the hull of a vessel running through the water, the interaction between the hull and waterway boundaries and to provide reliable information set on power requirements and manoeuvring abilities of a ship operating in a restricted fairway. Within the scope of hydrodynamics the DST performs traditionally experimental investigations – EFD (Experimental Fluid Dynamics) and in recent times, since the tremendous development of computer technique enabled efficient numeric processing, sophisticated research using the most advanced CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) methods. These two methods of approach to hydrodynamic optimisations are not just alternative to each other. In a serious scientific research they are rather complementary since, oftentimes, only the combined application of both within the same task leads to the highest quality solution. Some of the special testing facilities at the DST are unique in the world and enable the institute to cover the entire range of ship model tests relevant to shallow water navigation.
The work in the second field of waterborne and multimodal transport logistics supplements the scope of DST services. The crucial question in this area is to which extent the competitiveness of inland and coastal navigation mode can be amplified. Thereby, all actors in the entire system must be considered within the network, including links to the other modes and influences on all elements of the waterway network itself. Only a complex approach, appropriately combining shipbuilding and waterborne transportation aspects enables competent analyses of competitiveness of the IWT system and bringing reliable conclusions.
Introducing activities dealing with transport logistics issues, the potential number and structure of customers was enlarged manifold. Next to shipbuilders and ship-owners/ ship-operators, the respective research tasks and analyses are also offered to strategic and tactical transport policy makers, shipping companies, freight forwarders, waterways and port authorities and operators, and, last but not least, to various institutions dealing with social, labour and environmental affairs.

http://www.dst-org.de/